Getting a domain name

Choosing a domain name

Changing the domain name of your blog can cause administrative hassle and confusion to your regular readers (if you have any), so it is something you would want to minimise. When my previous free hosting at esuna.co.uk shut down, I moved my blog to its current location hosted on the uranus.mtveurope.org server, which required only a one-off fee to join. Neither of these extremely generous hosting packages included a free domain name, of course, so my blog ended up with a URL that started with those domains. Even if I thought my hosting at uranus.mtveurope.org would last forever, though, it would be natural to want to assign a short, memorable, unique address to the blog, and one which matches with the name of the blog.

Since the beginning, my blog has had the name “Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard”, which had always made sense to me, but when the time actually came to choose a permanent address for the blog, I started to analyse that phrase in a way I hadn’t really done before. Firstly I had to consider whether anyone would want to type such a long string of characters into their address bar, and quickly decided I should stick with something more manageable like “drab as a fool”.

Then I had to consider what it would look like with a TLD on the end, and indeed which TLD I would choose. I felt that I didn’t want to tie myself to any specific geographical region, but as .eu was available and covered a sufficiently wide and free area, I decided it was suitable. After worrying about whether “drab as a fool (dot) EU” would be misheard as ending “dotty you” or “fooly you”, I tried to go ahead with it, but upon checking the small print I found that .eu domains could not have the address of the registrant hidden from the public. This was not acceptable to the person who would actually be paying for the domain name (and in my mind goes against the data protection principles that the EU has championed) so I abandoned that idea.

Looking at other available TLDs (and even trying desperately to come up with a clever domain hack) I eventually came to a shortlist of .com, .net and .org. I even checked a list of popular blogs to see what they chose, and decided that it was inappropriate to consider myself COMmerical or an ORGanisation, whereas by choosing the .net TLD I would be following the precedent of such influential sites as Groklaw and Boing Boing. Fortunately registrations for .net addresses do allow privacy for the registrant and had no other onerous requirements.

Despite getting this far, the more I stared at the potential address “drab as a fool .net” the more doubts I started to have. I decided to sleep on it, but I ended up also writing out a list of all possible alternatives, including things like “aloof as a bard .net” and “fool aloof .net”. There were, I realised, at least two use cases that the address had to work well for: appearing in an email or business card, and being read out over the phone or told to someone in person. As a string without spaces only “foolaloof.net” seemed to work well, and admittedly “drabasablog.net” does take some parsing even if you can pick out the “blog.net” bit at the end. What I realised though, is that the limitation for something like “drabasafool.net” was the situation where I had to actually look someone in the eye and tell them my blog address, and see their reaction when I said “fool”. I could just imagine them thinking “Are you calling me a fool for wanting to read it? Are you saying that you’re a fool for writing it?”

The only way to be sure about such an important decision was to do a survey of the population of the internet, and as a representative sample I picked three people whose opinion I trusted but who had never bought a domain before. None of the respondents could think of anything better than, or even anything particularly wrong with “drabasablog.net”, and the majority opinion was that it made sense. I thought of it as being ironic, and reflecting the plain presentation of the site, which received a positive reaction from the respondents I explained this to. So finally that was the name I chose, and is the name I now use and am happy with.

Subsequent considerations

Once the name has been chosen, it must be checked for availability, and I always worry that the source I check with will go out and register the domain I’m interested in and hold it ransom. In theory a simple ping or dig will tell you the answer, unless your ISP or the dubious OpenDNS are returning deliberately false information to you. The alternative is to check with some independent body, such as VeriSign in the case of .net addresses, as they are the registry for those domains.

Assuming the domain is available, you then have to choose a registrar through which to purchase the registration. There are plenty to choose from for the big TLDs, and they should all have pretty similar prices, but it’s worth shopping around and checking for stories people have posted online about their experiences with the various registrars. The sort of scenarios you are trying to avoid are probably disclosure of your private details (which domain privacy should prevent, for a fee), the registrar letting your registration lapse and then stealing it from you, the registrar blocking your domain in an over-eager desire to support your opponent in a court case against you, and the registrar increasing their renewal fee then making it difficult or costly to transfer your domain to a different registry.

After paying up, there are the technical concerns too. For example, you will need a DNS server (or several) to respond to requests for your domain, and I recommend (for complete paranoia) having your DNS servers operated by some entity other than your registrar, preferably even in a different jurisdiction, with both of these jurisdictions different from the jurisdiction in which your site itself is hosted.

You can then at least start viewing your pages under your new domain, or at least a 404 error if you haven’t configured your site to handle requests at the new domain properly. One example of a setting you might need to change is the ServerName setting in the vhost of your Apache configuration, which may require a special arrangement with your hosting provider.

If you get this far, though, you will want all your old visitors flooding into your new site, which involves setting up a redirection and is an extra complication that I haven’t got around to attempting yet. There are two methods I have thought of: the first is setting up a mod_rewrite rule which is conditional on the domain name of the user’s request, and the second is to put a line of PHP at the start of your index.php file (if you have such a thing) which does this check and redirect programmatically. Making a configuration change is usually preferable to writing new software, and another advantage of a mod_rewrite rule is that it can be stored in a separate .htaccess file, without polluting your PHP files. A quick search online also shows that according to Google, the correct method is to use a 301 permanent redirect with an .htaccess file.

I still worry that there are various sites out there that link to my blog, possibly due to comments that my blog has left on them, which are now pointing to an outdated or even inaccessible URL. This is a real problem for search engine ranking, and means that you are having to compete against yourself, making it harder for interested readers to find the useful information you may provide. One action I have taken to increase my search engine ranking, however, is to produce a sitemap file and upload it to Google, which I have never done before and hopefully counts in favour of my new location. This was a relatively simple matter of installing a Serendipity plugin and clicking a few buttons, but I’ve been refraining from doing this until my new domain was bought.

Other changes

Another plugin I installed, while I was searching around, was a blog statistics plugin, as I was missing having the stats which my previous host provided. The standalone Serendipity plugin for stats doesn’t give you as much information as awstats, but it gives some useful indicators. For instance, I now know what sort of topics lead to the longest blog posts, and which search engines people use to find my site, although not which search terms, apparently. Perhaps the statistic I most want to share, however, is that my blog, at the time of installing the stats package, had recently passed the milestone of one million characters written. That includes whitespace and punctuation and syntax for HTML and other languages, but it does help to put my little blog in some sort of perspective.

I also reapplied the software “fix” I had previously coded that displays the dates in an ISO 8601 compliant format, and reinstalled the text CAPTCHA anti-spam method I had been using. Perhaps that prompts the question of who will find the new location of my blog sooner, my readers or the spammers?